The Executive's Desk Guest Commentary 121st year, No. 361

www.abqjournal.com Business Outlook Thursday,  December 27, 2001

How Leaders Learn: They L-E-A-D

"Leaders learn best in one of two ways: their way or the hard way. Often the two are the same." Michael H. Shenkman President, Keystone International, Inc., Strategic Development Group

By Michael H. Shenkman

As an author and a producer of seminars on leadership, I am amazed at all the educational resources available to help leaders be more effective. And from the content of these programs, you’d think educating leaders was a snap. Give leaders a list of personal goals, and they’ll strain to measure up to each item on the list. Give them a list of competencies that leaders are supposed to have and they’ll immediately uproot their lives in order to change their personalities. Right?

Wrong. Just the opposite is true. Most leaders don’t learn much from books or from two-day conferences. Leaders learn best in one of two ways: their way or the hard way. Often the two are the same.

Not that leaders aren’t amenable to constructive, meaningful opportunities for learning. To the contrary. Leaders are hungry for learning; but to reach them, you have to do it right. To describe an effective approach to educating leaders, we use an acronym: L-E-A-D.

L stands for Life. Leaders learn new skills from their life experiences. All our work with leaders includes a heavy dose of talking about what is really happening in their leadership situations. “This happened today… what do you think I should have done?” or, “I have this meeting coming up on Tuesday, what do you think about…?” These are the questions that leaders ask when they are really ready to think of something new, give it a try, see what happens and use the experience to gain new insights.

E stands for Exemplars. The benefit of having people like Jack Welch or Michael Dell speak at a conference is that leaders will listen to not only what they say, they’ll hear how they say it and try to imitate how they look when they say it.

But leaders also learn from the untitled and unheralded people all around them. For one of the most effective CEOs I work with, nothing is more boring than a meeting, dinner or round of golf with stuffed shirts who fancy themselves as business geniuses. He surrounds himself with people who read philosophy, are artistic or athletic, or who do lots of charity work. From these people he draws inspiration about what is possible and generates ideas about how to innovate. He listens to the people on the front lines of the business, and he listens to customers. These everyday line workers and customers are the people who drive him to think creatively and try things he himself had never thought of.

A stands for Adversity. Leaders’ values are the bedrock of their lives, and they live to test the viability of their values. Adversity breaks leaders loose from all their moorings of habit, custom, assumption, and puts those values to the test. Either those values prove equal to the situation or they don’t. A leader will suffer the agonies that follow from values proving to be ineffective, and they are willing to learn new values, or reprioritize the old ones, if that’s what it takes to make a difference.

Recently, during a ropes course leadership retreat, one of the group began by declaring that he didn’t like these kinds of things. Yet throughout the day he approached the exercises generously: never complaining, always contributing. He demonstrably put his values of teamwork and loyalty to the team above his fears. Everyone commented on how his visible effort created a model for a solid leadership team.

D stands for Decision. Decisions evoke emotion. They are breaking points, dividing lines between one possibility and another, or between there being possibility and there being none. People respond differently to those inflection points.

Leaders learn about the appropriateness of their values when they meet those emotions, first in themselves, and then in others. In our work with leaders, we always start our conversations with listening to stories about the consequences of their decisions. The stories that unfold always involve learning. “When I announced this I never thought there would be such a reaction.” Or, “I thought the decision would cause an uproar, but everyone just started out doing it.”

Decisions spark emotions that inspire wonder even in the most seasoned of leaders. When leaders respond to those emotions, they connect with followers and energize whatever needs to be done to achieve success.

The most creative and effective leaders know that they lead not by barking orders, after all. They lead by showing, visibly, effectively, passionately, that they are learning. Followers then feel free to learn as well. Innovation, collaboration, great results follow.

Leaders change worlds, true, but first they change themselves. Helping leaders learn requires hitting them where they live: making values come alive, testing them against the difficult challenges in life, dealing with how people really experience transformation. For a leader to learn, nothing less than real life will do.

Michael Shenkman, Ph.D., is founder and president of the Arch of Leadership (www.archofleadership.com), a leader mentoring company. This article was adapted from his new book, The Arch and The Path, the Life of Leading Greatly (Sandia Heights Media, 2005).